Smearing Trayvon Martin: The Salem Witch Trials, Mass Hysteria, and the Specter of Black Thuggery

The efforts to smear Trayvon Martin by introducing irrelevant information to what is most basically a simple story about white thuggery, and a violation of Constitutional rights, would be a fascinating footnote more worthy of a legal case book than a national drama if not for how conservatives and the glib classes have rallied to defend a murderer.

As I have written about in numerous places, black masculinity is an imperiled identity, one that is forever suspect and at risk. The rights afforded to others do not apply to bodies marked as black and male. Moreover, the obfuscations that are central to an exercise which assumes the criminal culpability and guilt of black Americans in all matters is a script that is centuries old.

The denial necessary to let George Zimmerman walk free, to cover up his deeds, to make excuses for killing innocent people, and to proceed a priori from an assumption that black men are a criminal class that can be killed at will, is evidence of a type of mass White hysteria.

They burned witches in the United States and Europe by the thousands for more than a century using much the same raggedy logic; White people hung and dismembered black women, men, and children and sold their body parts at county fairs using much the same logic; and in the post civil rights moment, Age of Obama, many in the White public skewer murder victims who happen to be black using a logic that assumes black criminality and white innocence in all transgressions--perceived or real--across the color line.

Accepting the self-serving lies of George Zimmerman (fictions he most certainly believes), his enablers, and the police who are collaborators in covering up their criminal incompetence, are in total, a type of spectral evidence.

This is a perfect analogy as the specter, i.e. a ghost, is only "real" to the person who sees it--what is a perfect fit for the claims of George Zimmerman to "self defense" at the hands of a black youth he harassed, stalked, and threatened. Spectral evidence is also a way of creating community. It is a litmus test for determining the boundaries of community, who is included, and who is excluded, by virtue of a shared experience.

The question then becomes how do those who believe in reasonable justice, and that Trayvon Martin was killed by a racist vigilante who likely called him a "coon" during the hunting, marshal evidence against ghosts, spirits, and the ectoplasma of white supremacy? A belief system that assumes all people of color guilty (of any myriad of crimes) at birth?